Ukraine’s Jews caught in a propaganda war based on the ‘political manipulation of anti-Semitism’

When masked men distributed leaflets last week in the eastern Ukraine city of Donetsk advising Jews they needed to register with authorities or face deportation, shivers were felt well beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Western media took the flyers at face value. (U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called them “grotesque” and “beyond unacceptable.”) And it’s easy to see why: That last bit about Ukrainian Jews being “hostile to the Orthodox Donetsk Republic and its citizens” is a pitch-perfect take on the universal theme of traditional European anti-Semitism — that Jews are rootless, untrustworthy aliens who must be publicly shamed, or worse.

These themes were at the heart of the most infamous and influential anti-Semitic tract of them all — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As with many anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns, the real target wasn’t only the Jews: The Protocols were cobbled together by Czarist hardliners seeking to tar political reformers as pawns of a diabolical Jewish conspiracy to control the world. In the Europe of the late 19th and early 20th century, using false documents to smear your enemy as a Jew-lover was viewed as effective hardball politics.

“In the year 2014, after all the miles travelled and all of the journey of history, this is not just intolerable — it’s grotesque,” John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, said in Geneva.

The origin of the tract remains murky and the group whose name was attached, the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, has denied any involvement. Jewish leaders in the city have said they see the incident as a provocation, rather than a real threat to their community of about 17,000 people.

But regardless of whether the leaflets were a dirty trick aimed at smearing pro-Russian separatists or the hateful handiwork of local fascists, they illustrate how the plight of Jews has become fuel for propaganda in a region with a long, bloody history of anti-Semitism.

“From our perspective, the real issue is, whatever the motivation, whoever the source, this was an incident of anti-Semitism that echoes the treatment of Jews in Germany by the Nazis in the 1930s, a message of intimidation,” said Michael Salberg, director of international affairs for the New York-based Anti-Defamation League.

The leaflet instructed all Jews over 16 to register with the self-declared provisional government and warned failure to do so would result in deportation and the confiscation of property. It said the measures were a response to the support of Jewish leaders for the Euromaidan movement that toppled Ukraine’s Russian-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych, in February.

Mr. Salberg called it shocking anyone would think of producing such a message and distributing it outside a synagogue during Passover.

“The context is not just the echo of Nazi Germany, but centuries of violence and scapegoating and singling out of Jews in Ukraine and in Russia,” he said.

In Ukraine, it is just the latest example of “the cynical, political manipulation of anti-Semitism — making it about Jews. That kind of singling out of Jews has a history, and it is a tragic history,” he added.

One person who sought to “make it about Jews” was Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. Invoking the centuries-old history of pogroms in what is now Ukraine, and more recently the 2012 election to parliament of a minority of representatives from the extreme-right Svoboda party, he denounced the new government in Kyiv as “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites.”

He said they stopped at nothing to topple Mr. Yanukovych. “Terror, murder, pogroms were used.”

Writing last month in The New York Times, Amelia Glaser, a professor of Russian literature at the University of California, San Diego, said Ukraine’s Jewish leaders can be found in the pro-Russian and pro-European camps. But Mr. Putin’s description of the new government is false.

“Far from being controlled by neo-Nazis, the new government includes several members of ethnic minorities, including Russians,” she wrote. “The new government has an Armenian minister of internal affairs and a Jewish deputy prime minister.”

Ukrainian Jewish groups have since published an open letter to Mr. Putin in some North American newspapers, including the National Post, challenging the notion Ukraine’s Jews were at risk of imminent pogroms.

“Yes, we are well aware that the political opposition and the forces of social protest who have secured changes for the better are made up of different groups,” the ad read. “They include nationalistic groups, but even the most marginal do not dare show anti-Semitism or other xenophobic behaviour. And we certainly know that our very few nationalists are well-controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government – which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security services.”

Anton Shekhovtsov, a political scientist at University College London who specializes in Europe’s extreme right, said while right-wing groups were a fringe player in the Euromaidan movement, they play a bigger role in the pro-Russian separatist movements in southern and eastern Ukraine.

“I would say that for the majority of those pro-Russian fascist groups that have been active in Ukraine, anti-Semitism is one of the defining features,” he said.

‘Putin is just using anti-Semitism as a kind of tool to discredit the Euromaidan process. He doesn’t care about anti-Semitism’

Well before the leaflets appeared last week, anti-Semitic posters, fascist banners and Nazi salutes had been on display among pro-Russian extremists in southeastern Ukraine. But do not expect Mr. Putin to be warning Ukrainians against the danger posed by these fascist groups any time soon, Mr. Shekhovtsov said.

“Putin is just using anti-Semitism as a kind of tool to discredit the Euromaidan process. He doesn’t care about anti-Semitism,” he said.

“If he had cared about anti-Semitism, he would have acted differently, because anti-Semitism in Russia and neo-Nazism in Russia is a much more significant problem than in Ukraine.”

Shimon Fogel, chief executive officer of the Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs in Ottawa, said recent events in Ukraine reveal an anti-Semitism that is based on political calculation, rather than a deep-seated hatred of Jews.

“I think that what we’re seeing play out in Ukraine is this tactical anti-Semitism, where the Jew becomes the instrument of trying to advance the agenda,” he said.

“The agenda on both sides is to discredit and undermine the credibility of their adversaries in the eyes of the international community that’s looking on with a great deal of anxiety.”

None of which, of course, makes it any more palatable for the Ukrainian Jew handed a vile leaflet or confronted with a firebombed synagogue, as was reported last week in the southeastern city of Nikolayev.

“To be sure, I think that the Jews do feel a degree of anxiety and distress,” Mr. Fogel said.

“I think that is shared by all Ukrainians who are unsure where things are going. But there is always an additional element of fear that attaches to Jews because of the bitter history, of how they have been the victims of all sorts of civil unrest, especially in that part of the world.”

Writing in the Washington Post last week, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the manipulative anti-Semitism on display in Ukraine is effective only as long as a significant number of Ukrainians fail to consider their Jewish compatriots to be truly part of the nation.

“When Jews are considered a natural part of the Ukrainian nation, anti-Semitism in Ukraine should wane, and the temptation to use anti-Semitism in politics should follow,” he wrote.